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Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
Traction force microscopy is a method widely used in biophysics and cell biology to determine forces that biological cells apply to their environment. In the experiment, the cells adhere to a soft elastic substrate, which is then deformed…
Biological cells are built up from many different constituents of varying size and stiffness which all contribute to the cell's mechanical properties. Despite this heterogeneity, in the analysis of experimental measurements such as atomic…
Everyday experience shows that cellular sheets are stiffened by the presence of a pressurized gas: from bicycle inner tubes to bubble wrap, the presence of an internal pressure increases the stiffness of otherwise floppy structures. The…
Equilibrating proteins and other biomacromolecules is cardinal for molecular dynamics simulation of such biological systems in which they perform free dynamics without any externally-applied mechanical constraint, until thermodynamic…
Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…
The mechanism by which cells measure the dimension of the organ in which they are embedded, and slow down their growth when the final size is reached, is a long-standing problem of developmental biology. The role of mechanics in this…
While mechanobiology has demonstrated that precise control over mechanical properties at the whole-cell level is crucial for many biological functions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the intracellular mechanical properties.…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…
Softer means stickier for solid adhesives, because material compliance facilitates close contact between non-conformal surfaces. Recent discoveries have revealed that soft materials can exhibit a rich array of new physics arising from…
This paper presents an extended coarse-grained investigation of the elastic properties of polystyrene. In particular, we employ the well-known MARTINI force field and its modifications to perform extended molecular dynamics simulations at…
Robust control of complex engineered and biological systems hinges on the integration of feedforward and feedback mechanisms. This is exemplified in neural motor control, where feedforward muscle co-contraction complements sensory-driven…
The conditions under which biological cells switch from a static to a motile state are fundamental to the understanding of many healthy and pathological processes. In this paper, we show that even in the presence of a fully symmetric…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…
Cells attach to their environment by means of focal adhesions, which are molecular complexes that exhibit the remarkable ability to adapt to mechanical load by changing their size. Drawing from the biomolecular mechanisms underlying this…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
As an effective method to deliver external materials into biological cells, microinjection has been widely applied in the biomedical field. However, the cognition of cell mechanical property is still inadequate, which greatly limits the…
We investigate a continuum mechanical model for an adherent cell on two dimensional adhesive micropatterned substrates. The cell is modeled as an isotropic and homogeneous elastic material subject to uniform internal contractile stresses.…
The recent development of single-cell transcriptomics has enabled gene expression to be measured in individual cells instead of being population-averaged. Despite this considerable precision improvement, inferring regulatory networks…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…